To his beautiful, cultured girlfriend, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow was a changed man: a middle-aged former Chinese mafia-don who was determined to go straight after nearly two decades in jail.
Embracing community life in San Francisco, he volunteered with gang-prevention organisations and looked after Alicia Lo’s young daughter, walked her dogs and went with her to art openings, smart restaurants and the city’s gay pride parade.
It was a shock for her when police with semi-automatic weapons drawn raided Ms Low’s home at dawn on March 26 last year. Prosecutors described a very different Shrimp Boy.
After a five-year undercover FBI sting operation, he was first charged with 140 counts of racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy and trafficking in contraband cigarettes and scheduled to stand trial on November 2. Then on Friday, a federal grand jury lodged a more serious charge for which he will be tried separately: murder. Prosecutors allege that in 2006, two years before he met Ms Lo, he ordered the assassination of Allen Leung, the head of one of San Francisco Chinatown’s fraternal business organisations, known as Tongs.
Mr Chow replaced him and turned the group into an organised crime outfit, selling stolen goods, drugs and guns, the grand jury indictment says. The investigation has also implicated a leading former state senator, who has pleaded guilty to taking bribes.
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Mr Chow has pleaded not guilty to all the claims. He says that he resisted temptations repeatedly placed in his way by the FBI’s chief informant. He knows what it feels like to await a trial knowing he did “something wrong” but said that this time “I didn’t fall for that”.
His lawyer Tony Serra, an octogenarian Grateful Dead enthusiast who took a vow of poverty in the 1960s and has defended Black Panthers, Hells Angels and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped the heiress Patty Hearst, calls the reformed Mr Chow “an exemplary human being”.